How do political cultures take shape, and why do they fissure? Do border closures make minority identities stronger or weaker in the long run? How are gender dynamics in families transformed by state repression - and when can family decisions about identity, in turn, shape national or even international politics? How can answering these questions inform policies designed to integrate people with diverse backgrounds? These questions motivate my research agenda on authoritarianism, immigration, and identity transmission decisions among Balkan-originating populations and beyond. 

I am a social scientist currently based at the University of Mannheim in Germany as a Lorenz-Von-Stein Research Fellow at the Mannheim Centre for European Social Research (MZES). I received my PhD in political science from the University of Notre Dame, USA, in 2024 with a dissertation on communist states' dual use of recognition and repression of identity leveraged for a retroactive experiment on mechanisms of identity transmission. When teaching, I emphasize the connection between empirical work, field research, and theory-building. In addition to academic work, I teach, write, and consult for projects related to migration, education of students with diverse backgrounds, identity, historical archives-into-data transformations, field research, and project management. (More about me here).